Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."
मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"
समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."
G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”
C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."
Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”
सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."
".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."
Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."
Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"
विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The wealthy always take what they want
Nothing about businessmen these days surprise me but it still made me shriek. Sample this:
“The first and most fundamental myth he explodes in this tour d’horizon of the billionaire businessmen of Hong Kong and south-east Asia is the self-serving notion that the godfathers were in some way responsible for high economic growth in the run-up to the 1997 financial crisis and for the recovery thereafter…
But his myth-busting is as merciless as it is enlightening. Does Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, work as hard as the myth of the toiling Chinese tycoon suggests? Yes, if you count playing golf, arriving at the office at 10am, checking the press to see if anyone has said anything nasty about you, holding a business lunch and having a massage or two as hard work…
he puts the tycoons firmly in the context of contemporary Asian politics, arguing the wealthy have merely taken advantage of the lamentable failure of the region’s politicians to regulate economies for the benefit of society as a whole.The disadvantaged are not only the labourers on low wages but also the middle classes, punished by high costs for cartel-provided goods and often cheated of their share of profits if they are foolish enough to invest as minority shareholders in godfather- controlled listed companies.”
Read that again….. the wealthy have merely taken advantage of the lamentable failure of the region’s politicians to regulate economies for the benefit of society as a whole…..
Isn’t this true of India as much as any other country in the region? Was even Mahatma Gandhi manipulated by Birlas and Bajajs and other Khadi wearing tycoons?
Based on Indivar Kamtekar’s State and Class in India, 1939-45, a harsher indictment of the Indian business class was presented by SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR in his August 2003 Times of India article “Independence & the Bengal famine”.
“…In Britain, the upper classes sacrificed much for the war effort and there was social levelling. But in India, the propertied classes benefited enormously from the war, while casual labourers suffered terribly. The Raj needed to harness the Indian upper classes for the war effort, and so pampered them while placing crushing burdens on the poor. The Bengal Famine was an outcome of this arrangement…
…. Above all, the business class flourished. The war required unprecedented quantities of every sort of manufacture. Lack of shipping constrained competition from imports. The price of cloth rose five-fold before the colonial state imposed price controls: its top priority was to encourage production, not worry about janata cloth. Business fortunes were made, and new giants like Telco and Hindustan Motors emerged in this period. Tax evasion was widespread and not seriously checked by the authorities. Indeed, some businessmen defended tax evasion as “patriotic” non-cooperation with the Raj! But the very scarcity that helped the propertied classes hit casual labourers. It also hit pensioners and others on a fixed income. The real wages of factory workers declined 30% between 1939 and 1943. By contrast, British real wages rose 49%, a levelling up. The rural landless in India were the worst hit. They had neither access to the new urban jobs or rationed urban supplies. Ranging from a quarter of the rural population in Bengal to over half in Madras, they bore the brunt of spiralling prices…
The Great Bengal Famine was a colossal human tragedy, but, cynically, no cause for political panic. Those who died could not even be counted properly, because they counted for so little. This is a harsh indictment of the class that led our independence movement. It suggests that it was no accident that Mahatma Gandhi was also a personal friend of G D Birla.”
Artist: William Steig The New Yorker 2 July 1960
Was CIA behind all of India’s problems?
For example, a few Marathi authors and newspaper editors were rumored to be on CIA’s payroll. “Thanthanpal”- the late Jaywant Dalvi once worked for USIS. I guess he was ‘confirmed’ CIA agent! Ed Fisher’s picture below was no exaggeration at all. Elephant troubles like recent ones in Kerala would have been easily blamed on CIA.
If allegiance to America is a criterion for being a CIA agent, most upper middle-class people in India have always been so because children and close relations of many of them have emigrated to US. They don’t need any extra payment for that!
India Today July 16, 2007 screams “How China Duped Nehru-
Recently declassified CIA documents present an account of China’s gameplan of intrigue and deception that led to the 1962 Sino-India war”
Looks like CIA has lost none of its influence!
Are we going to believe all that CIA tells us? Or the story is important only because it embarrasses Sonia Gandhi- granddaughter-in-law of Nehru? How will we take to another likely headline: “How India duped Pakistan- Recently declassified CIA documents present an account of India’s gameplan of intrigue and deception that led to division of Pakistan in 1971”.
Artist: Ed Fisher The New Yorker 3 Oct 1964